IDentity

Discrimination takes many forms — educational background, sex, race. Racial discrimination, based on innate and unchangeable qualities, continues to have significant impact today: the Black Lives Matter movement, and, following the pandemic, growing violence against people of Asian descent in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

Recent neuroscience research has highlighted that the amygdala — a primitive part of the brain governing anxiety and fear — responds when a person sees a race different from their own, before judgment forms. These unconscious, automatic reactions are known as latent prejudice.

Countermeasures tend to focus on rationality — laws and education — but they may not reach structural discrimination or violence rooted in latent prejudice. IDentity uses AR glasses and real-time AI image processing to replace a person's image with a racially ambiguous face, preserving expression while obscuring racial characteristics: an intervention in perception itself, before cognition.

In the context of police patrols in the US — where Black Americans are 2.4 times more likely than whites to be shot and killed per racial population — IDentity asks whether such preventable actions could be reduced.